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Welcome to Fox Paw Press & Papermill. This quick virtual tour is meant to introduce you to many of the tools used here. In the center of the press room is my favorite work-horse, a 1917 Chandler & Price New Style 8x12 job press (pictured right). Type cabinets line the walls, as you can see, to the north and east. Among my favorite type faces represented here are Caslon, Bembo, Colm Cille, Perpetua, Baskerville, Goudy Old Style and Jensen. Every shop has a composing stone, where, before the type is printed it must be locked into place inside the chase, then transferred to the press to be printed. No shop, of course, would be complete without a reliable paper cutter. Mine is a 19” Challenge guillotine. Other presses, which I've collected along the way include an Old Style Gordon, an 1892 press which was named after its inventor, a spiritualist who claimed that Ben Franklin came to him in a dream and told him how to build the press. The Gordon press became very popular and was widely copied. This press is one I bought from Bill McGarry in Chaska, MN. My father, Duane Scott and I have been restoring it. Soon it will be in his shop. Eventually Gordon sold his business to Chandler & Price, around the turn of the century, and the Gordon press, with refinements, was produced and became the C&P press. Around the same time that Gordon was making his presses, the Golding Company Another of Golding's presses, the No. 11 Pearl, (pictured left) is a press rescued by my friend Neil Giroux, from a shop window in Massachusetts, restored and trucked to Minnesota. To perforate my artistamps, I use my "new" Rosback treadle-operated perforator, patented in 1888, but manufactured sometime after that. I use it to add authenticity to my stamps. It will perforate up to three sheets at a time. This pretty little copy press was originally used to make copies of business correspondence before the days of carbon paper. Now it comes in handy for flattening hand-made paper and book-binding. I use the “Big Red” press in papermaking. Fresh wet paper, which has just been couched onto felts, is stacked--felt/paper/felt/paper, etc., and put into the press. The press then is used to squeeze the excess water out of the paper. The Umpherstein beater is a little papermaking machine my dad made out of plywood and fiberglass. The beating mechanism beats against a metal plate at the bottom of the machine. The metal and beater don't actually meet, but come close enough to beat the fiber to a pulp, which, depending on the fiber--usually old cotton rags--can take several hours. I can make my own rubber stamps with this handy little Vulcanizer, in a two-step process. If you have questions about any of this equipment, please feel free to contact me. |
I will be highlighting some of them in other areas of the site as well.
manufactured a series of very popular job presses, including my favorite, the